Andyʼs working notes
About these notesReading texts on computers is unpleasant
The real growth in the adoption of e-books will happen when the traditional book is deconstructed and reconstructed (textually, behaviorally and commercially) in order to create new paradigms for storing and delivering content in electronic forms. Carden, 2008
- Continuous-scroll digital reading uncomfortably disrupts object permanence
- Poor performance disrupts nonlinear reading in digital reading
- Maintaining multiple reading positions is difficult when reading digitally
- Parallel reading is mostly impossible in digital reading
- Few digital reading environments support marginal notes
- Digital annotation is too formal
- Backlit displays limit computers to interiors
This is an important problem because Mass adoption of written media with novel cognitive supports requires mass adoption of reading on computers (or else we need Methods for bringing dynamic mediums to physical reading contexts).
Related but separate:
References
Carden, M. T. J. (2008). E-Books are not books. Proceeding of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories - BooksOnline ’08, 9. https://doi.org/10.1145/1458412.1458416
Maintaining multiple reading positions is difficult when reading digitally
When reading physical books (particularly during Inspectional reading), a skilled reader naturally maintains their reading position in multiple sections of the book simultaneously. For example, this might be a “stack” operation (keeping their place while referencing another), a “dog-earing” operation (accumulating a set of places to focus on; see Askwall), or a parallel reading operation (comparing several passages). Digital readers make this kind of operation very difficult.
Because screens are often bigger than physical books, one might use multiple windows to manage this, but Parallel reading is mostly impossible in digital reading. Even on desktop operating systems, most digital reading applications won’t even let you open a second window viewing the same document. This limitation is exacerbated by the problems described in Poor performance disrupts nonlinear reading in digital reading.
As an alternative, one might use bookmarks or an explicit in-system structure to manage reading locations. But digital readers’ bookmarks—when they have them—are always too heavy.
LiquidText is the one exception here: it uses multitouch to create ad-hoc bookmarking and provides a canvas where one can accumulate increasingly durable references.
The Amazon Kindle has a simple one-direction navigation stack for a limited set of operations, like jumping to a footnote or to a place in the table of contents. This helps, but only in a small subset of cases.
References
Askwall, S. (1985). Computer supported reading vs reading text on paper: A comparison of two reading situations. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 22(4), 425–439. ~https://doi.org/10.1016/S0020-7373(85)80048-1~
Parallel reading is mostly impossible in digital reading
As far as I’m aware, no PDF or EPUB reader allows readers to view multiple non-contiguous pages at a time. If you want to look at the part of the bibliography which corresponds to the chapter you’re reading, you’ll need to flip back and forth. LiquidText is the only mass-market exception I know of.
Among other things, this exacerbates Physical cut and paste is a parallel act involving informal intermediate states.
Related: Maintaining multiple reading positions is difficult when reading digitally
Physical cut and paste is a parallel act involving informal intermediate states
Larry Tesler’s classic “cut” and “paste” operations are named after physical counterparts an author might employ as he edits a composition. But, as Ted Nelson points out in Geeks Bearing Gifts, the digital version is rigidly formal and sequential, whereas the physical activities are inherently parallel and informal. When physically cutting and pasting, you cut up your work, spread it on the floor, and rearrange the pieces. Along the way, they’ll pass through various temporary, “invalid” configurations as you explore the connections.
The standard digital cut and paste prevents the fluidity of the physical process. Worse, there isn’t even “expert-level” software which enables something like the original behavior for sophisticated use cases. An approach like that of LiquidText might work, but there seem to be many unsolved problems in that space.
This is vaguely connected to Peripheral vision: you want to be able to see and manipulate the whole and the parts simultaneously here, but you can’t.
Related: We lack UI patterns for non-destructive filtering and rearrangement on a 2D canvas
References
Ted Nelson’s chapter summary for his book, Geeks Bearing Gifts: http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/gbgContents.html
The term “cut and paste”, as used by writers and editors for many years, refers to rearrangement of paper manuscripts by actually cutting them and physically rearranging them on desktop or floor. ==It is a process of parallel contemplation and rearrangement, where you look at all the parts, move pieces around, put them in temporary nonsequential arrangements, and choose a final sequence.==
In 1984 this changed: when the Macintosh comes out, they change the meaning of “cut” to hide and the meaning of “paste” to plug. To be fair, many people, not just the PARCies, imagine that the serial process of hiding and plugging contents is THE SAME as the parallel process of rearrangement.
This original parallel rearrangement process is fundamental to writing and revision, especially in large-scale projects. Because no good rearrangment software exists, it is far harder to organize large projects on the computer than it was with typewriters, before the PUI. The organization of large projects has become far more difficult, unless you print out and physically cut and paste the old way.
The characteristic of knowledge workers having cluttered desks might be explained thus: whilst a piece of written information is in the process of informing a knowledge worker, then they cannot sensibly name it and file it because its subsequent use or role in their world is as yet undetermined. In contrast, the information filed in a PDA can only inform the kind of action which they could determine in advance that it would inform.